


Immortal Obsession

by Tarlan



Category: The Insatiable (2006)
Genre: Banners & Icons, Gen, Post-Movie(s), Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8349553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/pseuds/Tarlan
Summary: Strickland didn't have proof she'd turned Harry, but his gut feeling was rarely wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Michael Biehn Challenge Oct 2016

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He should have known helping his neighbor, Harry Balbo, find a vampire was a big mistake. The man was obsessed but it was a different kind of obsession to the one that had gripped Strickland since he saw his first vampire in Vietnam attack and kill his platoon. He'd watched in horror as his comrades were torn limb-from-limb, and the only reason he had survived was because he had played dead after a single blow from the female vampire broke his back. The military put his body back together as best it could, leaving him wheelchair bound, but thought his mind had snapped when he described what had happened in that Vietcong village. With no one willing to believe him he had been medically discharged, and he had spent the past thirty years tracking vampires across the world from his small apartment.

Unlike him, Harry wasn't on some quest to rid the world of another of these foul creatures, saving the life of who knows how many future victims. No, Harry had been obsessed with the vampire itself - a beautiful enchantress who had slowly wormed her way into his subconscious.

Harry had killed for her - not just rabbits but people. He had become as much of a monster as her and Strickland knew from that last phone call that he was going down to the basement to set her free even at the cost of his own life, in some bizarre need for absolution. Yet it wasn't only his life that was taken that night, for when the Police came looking for Harry, having found his fingerprints all over the disposal bags wrapped around one of her victims, all they found was the empty cage in the basement. No Tatiana, and no Harry. Call it Stockholm Syndrome or fate or even some twisted form of love, but when given the chance she had not drained Harry of every last drop of blood before disappearing into the night, leaving his corpse behind.

Strickland didn't have proof at first that she had turned Harry rather than keep him as a blood-bag lover until he was too depleted to feed her, but even without a gut feeling he had noticed how the pattern of kills in the five mile radius stretching out from this neighborhood had changed over the past weeks since Harry's disappearance. He knew from observation it was two vampires working together, a macabre partnership of sharing kills and feeds. One luring in the victim for both to feed upon, males and females. It confused the Police because the M.O. for the former headless all-male victims had changed to include women. They thought they were looking at a separate serial killer, perhaps a copycat, and they were both right and wrong in their profile. The proof had come for Strickland with the disappearance of certain easy targets within the apartment building; a young woman who'd always been interested in Harry, and the obnoxious guy in 5D who was forever calling on Harry to clear his blocked toilet, which ended up blocking the pipe all the way down to the ground floor, including Strickland's apartment in 3D. Even Strickland had hated the guy and his nasty toilet habits, but not enough to want to see him become the victim of vampires.

Harry was a vampire now, of that Strickland was certain. He knew Tatiana and her newly turned vampire consort wouldn't stay in L.A. much longer as each kill increased the chance of them being caught, but Strickland knew he was threat to both of them for he'd be able to track them wherever they went in the world. Unfortunately, he could no longer hide behind the anonymity of the Internet as Harry knew all about him and his tracking methods. Harry knew he would figure out everything from the intelligence gathered through his vampire website and from Police calls, eventually narrowing down where they slept during the day, leaving them vulnerable to attack. 

They would be coming for him soon as he doubted the 'bond of friendship' he'd forged with Harry would be enough to stay the vampire's hand... or bite. So he forced himself to sleep during the day, and every night he pulled on his battle armor and faced the door, shotgun in hand... for all the good it would do him against a vampire... but he would go down fighting. Until he saw signs of them having moved out of the city he could not relax his guard, but the wait was wearing on him, leaving him wondering when it would be his time to join the rest of his platoon as the victim of a vampire attack.

"Come and get me, you bloodsuckers!" he cursed loudly. "I know you're out there!"

And yet night would turn to day, and with it sometimes another missing person or a drained, dismembered corpse would be reported over the Police radio; yet another victim as Tatiana and Harry expanded their hunting ground using Harry's greater knowledge of the city. Each kill or disappearance was fed into Strickland's algorithm; each statistic narrowing down the search for the immortal killers to just a few abandoned buildings that he could put up on his website for any wannabe vampire hunter to go check out.

Eventually Tatiana and Harry would come for him. They had to if they wanted to survive.

END  
 


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